Heretofore, a number of approaches have been taken to making fabrics both cleanable and liquid resistant so as to be more useful in environments where liquid staining is likely to occur. Vinyl coated fabrics have been most broadly accepted for these purposes due to relatively easy cleanability and fairly low cost. However, such vinyl coated fabrics are typically rather stiff to the touch and thereby lack the desired appearance and feel for use in environments such as restaurants, nursing homes, and the like where pleasing tactile and visual perceptions by the user are considered important. Surface laminated fabrics have been utilized to enhance the aesthetic characteristics of the fabrics, but due to the generally disjunctive adherence between the laminate film and the fabric itself, these products tend to peel, crack, and delaminate after long periods of use. Such laminated products also tend to lack the generally desirable feel of standard upholstery products.
Adherence of a liquid barrier film or coating to a fabric substrate is made all the more difficult when fluorochemical stain-resist treatments are applied, since such compositions by their nature tend to repel an applied coating.
The present invention overcomes these seemingly contradicting requirements of fluorochemically based stain resistance in combination with a strongly adherent fluid barrier shield through proper selection of the base textile material in combination with the selection of coating materials and application processes so as to permit a very thin layer (preferably less than 0.010 inches) of barrier material to be applied. Moreover, the actual material making up this barrier layer preferably possess elastomeric properties which tend to conform substantially to those of the fabric substrate. The present invention therefore represents a useful advancement over present practices.